Your Chinese zodiac sign is set by your year of birth in a repeating twelve-year cycle: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. Each year also carries one of five elements and is either Yang or Yin. Enter a year and this calculator returns the animal, its element, its polarity and the nearby years that share the same sign.
In the Chinese zodiac (Sheng Xiao), the animals rotate in a fixed 12-year order, so the same sign returns once every twelve years. Tradition says the order was decided by where each animal finished in the Great Race called by the Jade Emperor. Your animal is set by the Chinese lunar year in which you were born.
The order never changes and never skips, so the arithmetic is simple: subtract 4 from the year and take the remainder on division by 12. A remainder of 0 is the Rat, 1 the Ox, and so on to 11 for the Pig. 2020 leaves a remainder of 0 and is therefore a Rat year, and so are 2008, 1996 and 1984.
Element and animal advance at different rates, which is what makes the combined cycle sixty years long rather than twelve. The animal repeats every twelve years and the element every ten, and the two only return to the same pairing after the lowest number they both divide into, which is sixty.
Alongside the animal, each year carries one of five elements - Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water - which colours how the sign expresses itself. Every element rules two consecutive years, and because the element and animal cycles line up only once every 60 years, a Wood Rat and a Fire Rat are read quite differently. The year's last digit points to its element:
Alongside the animal and the element, each year is either Yang or Yin: even-numbered years are Yang and odd-numbered years are Yin. Because the elements run in pairs of consecutive years, each element always covers one Yang year and one Yin year, which is why the sixty-year cycle contains thirty of each and why no animal ever pairs with the same element twice in a lifetime.
This calculator takes a calendar year and nothing else. It does not ask for a date, so it cannot decide for you whether a January or early February birth falls before or after Chinese New Year. If you were born in those weeks, look up the New Year date for your birth year, and if your birthday came first, enter the previous year instead.
For educational purposes. Astrological interpretations are traditional and not a substitute for professional advice.